


listen to the tunnels whispering

by captainhurricane



Category: Metro 2034, metro 2033
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-06-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 22:15:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1758313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainhurricane/pseuds/captainhurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>your ghosts will linger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	listen to the tunnels whispering

You don’t dream about the future in the metro. If you do, you do it in your sleep, in whispers and in the dark when there’s nothing else to do and the Kalashnikov in your hand is just a heavy weight. Of course you can’t take dreams and ambitions away from humankind so all of you whisper of myths and legends, of a city where life goes on like it did before the bombs fell, of little faraway places up above (you all know the sunlight is toxic and the beasts above would like nothing more than to feast on your kind) that have survived despite all odds, despite the fact that the bombs made entire cities vanish. 

You don’t dream about the future in the metro. But you dream of the past. Of Moscow in her prime, her people and her pride, the dirty little side streets and the chatter of people that can now only be found in the most crowded of stations. Of sunlight that doesn’t burn your eyes out, of light that is not man-made, that does not flicker and of the darkness that comes in the night that is not full of the whispers of dead. (Haven’t you heard? When you die in the metro, you don’t go anywhere. You live in the metro, you die in the metro. You stay in the metro, your desperate spirit clawing at the tunnel-walls, at the skeletons of trains have long since stopped moving).

* 

Artyom gathers the pieces of his mind and gets married but sometimes in the smile of his wife he sees the cry for help from a Dark One and he backs away. On his shifts he holds his gun all the more tighter. He dreams of them, sometimes. Of their eerie whispers and long, black fingers reaching for him. Artyom, Artyom, Artyom.

*

Hunter smashes the mirrors he comes across and with it, smashes his fears. He’s faced the monsters of the surface and of the dark tunnels of the metro without it, has walked through empty stations that drove other men mad. But this he fears: the stranger in his reflection.

*

Sasa finds later on that it’s easy to leave behind her father’s ghost and the sadness of his smile. We’re gonna see the real sun someday, Доченька. I swear. They do not see the sun. Sasa only looks up to see the roof of the metro, the curved halls of the biggest stations, the barely lit ones of its darkest tunnels. What is sunlight worth anyway when humanity has dwindled into its last lights.

*

There is no room in the metro for doubt, for the fear of death (or the living). There is no room for hope of a better tomorrow, of humanity rising again from the ashes of a nuclear war, rising back to the surface and blinking at the first rays of sunlight and hunting the flying beasts for food. 

Maybe someday, maybe someday. 

There are books still somewhere, scattered under fallen bodies, burnt to ashes, stuck in this or that station under the mattress of a soldier, hidden in the halls of the Polis and its grand beauty. Maybe someday they will have the knowledge that saves humanity from total extinction, from the fact that the six billion lives have dwindled into a few thousand, stuck in the maze of the Moscow metro, facing broken tunnels and broken people, tunnels that lead nowhere, tunnels that whisper with the voices of the dead, tunnels that are just tunnels and stations that have more monsters than men.

Maybe someday there will be cracks in the ceiling and the light will mean redemption for the humanity that dug its own grave


End file.
